“... hair drifted across the floor and settled by Turgenev’s boot.At last they went out the prison gates, meeting ‘the great roar of the overjoyed crowd’ (around 25,000 people were already on the spot at 3 a.m.), and Turgenev – his legs weakening beneath him – watched Troppmann climb the steps to the guillotine, ‘two men pouncing on him from the ...”

“... characteristic of him not to see anything odd about adding: ‘An English historian can praise ... Henry VIII without being supposed to condone the beheading of wives.’ Carr’s views and prose style owed much to his experience of the Foreign Office, which he did not leave until his mid-forties. At Cambridge, he excelled as a Classicist (he won the Porson ...”

“... drawing was done with a nurse’s blue pencil on the flyleaf of a volume of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson.‘These drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a locked ...”

“... a momentous one. Had Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot, say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good and there would be no story to tell. Books, she would have thought, were work. As it was, with this one she soon became engrossed and, passing her bedroom that night clutching ...”